Re: Which one should fail?
It might be entertaining if Oracle got it and then started trying to shaft the DoD. Real tanks on their lawn!
33111 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
... ouch!
We now have two major instances of wild-life successfully moving into areas which have been evacuated. It raises questions of how they are able to do this given that the radioactivity levels are reckoned to be lethal. Is this selection of species and maybe even individuals of species which are more tolerant? Are the estimates of lethal levels too low?
Probably the former, I suspect. There are parallels in that a few select plant species are capable of living on soil conaminated by lead mining, for example.
"third Sunday in Lent"
Not in July.
Having spent some time sorting out medieval dates when the membranes for different years had been mixed up, the variable feasts were a great source of circular reasoning. It didn't help that the Easter calculator I found online disagreed with another Easter table I found - resolved when I discovered that in some years the calculator gave me dates that didn't fall on a Sunday.
One difficulty of linking a vaccine record with a device is establishing that the subject of the record and the holder of the device when it's checked are the same person.
In my case the invitation for vaccination was sent to my mobile but from then on the chain simply runs on a set of assumptions. What's more SWMBO received her invitation from the local GP by POTS.
The systems were designed to get as many people as possible trhough the vaccination centre doors as quickly as possible in some sort of sequence. They weren't designed to have this sort of add-on.
"Doing stuff for the Hell of it with no real thought of the consequences… Isn’t this the very definition of disruptive design? Isn’t this the core value around which the whole modern IT industry revolves these days?"
No, the core value of the modern IT industry and motive for disruptive design is what it always was: hopes of profit.
Unfortunately the hopes are all too often fulfilled. The wages of sin are several good quarters.
I think "proving originality" might be too strong a phrase. Viewers of Fake or Fortune will be familiar with catalogues raisonnés and institutes or even individuals specialising in authenticating the works of dead artists. Sometimes a reasonable case can be made for rejecting an object by the presence of later materials (but was it later retouching?) but all too often actual proof is out of reach. In such cases it seems to come down to personal opinion and a better approach would be to say "It's not possible to be definitive but these are my observations and this is my interpretation of them" allowing for the situation that opinions will differ between experts and over time - which will happen anyway. Being upfront about this would, however, rather get in the way of such high-priced sales.
Or simply regulate to require easy recycling. If the constituents are sufficiently valuable and the products economically recyclable, preferably by an industry standard process then recycling becomes a business opportunity, it will happen; if not by the manufacturers themselves, then by third parties.
"What I dont get is why?"
Microsoft has managed to get H/W manufacturers to ship Windows on pretty well every desktop. This is not only to their immediate advantage in terms of sales, it keeps other options more or less out of the market place except where the H/W vendor also has their own OS.
Periodically rendering existing H/W obsolete by introducing a new version, making the old one EoL and blocking the new one on a lot of old H/W does the H/W vendors a favour.
Linux, on the other hand, keeps old H/W alive a lot longer. If you were a H/W manufacturer which OS would you rather continue to install as standard?
Not that I'd want to praise Windows but W7 Starter was shipped on my MSI nettop that came with 1Gb and had a 2 Gb limit.
As to whether it was able to do anything useful, I've no idea because for actual use I installed Linux. Apart from being used for work whenever I wanted something really portable it's also been used as to test new releases. Debian Bullsblood & Devuan Chimaera with KDE have finally found its limits - or have they? They're still in a pre-release state.
We hope buses don't collide that often.
As to bus bunching, there is an explanation. If a bus is slightly delayed at one point there are, on average, a few more people to board (and subsequently alight) at the remaining stops. Each extra person boarding and alighting takes more time so the bus is more delayed. Those extra people would have been picked up by the next bus so it runs a little faster and catches up with the first bus. Apply in reverse for a bus running early, it catches up with the previous one hence bus companies instruct drivers not to get ahead of schedule.
It would be good to think that politicians would realise that "going digital" or being "data driven" involves more than making the announcement, showing each other PowerPoints about it and discovering the hard way how to handle more than 32K rows of data. They should at the very least work out what might then be their core competences - stuff that they shouldn't outsource but have in-house.
"Maybe we are just bad at estimating the mass in a galaxy but there's a lot of very smart people doing very detailed calculations and they all seem to be finding mass missing."
But there are also a lot of very smart people trying to work out what form the missing mass takes and so far have come up with a variety of possible explanations as per your list but some of them are hypothetical and those which aren't, such as neutrinos so far haven't been shown to exist in sufficient quantities.
Sometimes science predicts things which are yet to be discovered. Predictions based on gaps in a theoretical framework have often been successful, as in particle physics. Predictions based on a gap in observations, such as phlogiston or luminiferous aether less so.
It will fall - and, unfortunately maybe has fallen - victim to long term operation in a hostile environment combined with a lack of means to service it without the Shuttle.
The end of the Shuttle programme may well have been in part due to budget cuts but also due to the fact that it had shown itself to be unsafe to an extent that was no longer acceptable.
I'm going to an event this weekend that requires evidence of a -ve lateral-flow test which is my first experience of this - take the test, go to an NHS site and record the result.
Nicely made up kits (we used to make up kits for scenes of crime officers so it's something I notice) with a nice clearly written protocol. But it relies entirely on honesty in recording the results and when it's to qualify for entry to some event I'm sure some will just dispose of the test strip unused and then report a negative result.
Reporting it was interesting too. As is standard practice with gov.uk sites it declared itself to be an alpha site - will they never decide something should be of release quality before it's released. And it really was alpha quality - it barfed on my post-code which couldn't be recognised due to a "technical issue" (is it yet another organisation running on a copy of PAF more than two decades old?) and ring 119. 119 was a D & D maze of "press 1" or "press 2" with the odd exhortation to use the web-site which had directed me there. Eventually I spoke to an agent on a dodgy line - one of her questions really rendered me momentarily speechless - after telling her initially why I was ringing I was asked how I heard about this service!
Oh well, at least Dido In Disaster Out couldn't have influenced the design of the test kits.
Nothing says to your employees "we don't care enough about you to provide you with a small personal space" like hot-desking.
Replacing all the tall partitions with lower ones so that the partition mounted bookshelves were way over there by the window and at the same time moving another department with a loud dot-matrix printer right behind you said much the same thing.
At one time it seemed more or less universal for ports and connectors to be colour-coded, especially PS-2 keyboard & mouse ports.
I suppose the crayon department objected on aesthetic grounds. Maybe that's why laptops seem not to have LEDs on the network ports now although that could just be the bean counters.